Web design for Broulee businesses
This was the first port on the coast and the administrative centre for everything from Jervis Bay to Eden. Then a flood opened a river bar up the road and the trade left. It is a useful story about where customers actually go.
The first town here, and it did not stay the main one
Broulee was surveyed and gazetted in 1837, traded with Sydney, and was the administrative centre for the court and police districts stretching a very long way in both directions. Then in 1841 a flood cleared the bar at the river mouth up the road, the shipping went there instead, and within a decade so had the court and most of the commerce.
It is worth knowing because the same thing happens to businesses, quietly and constantly. The trade goes where it is easiest to get to, and "easiest" is decided by something outside your control and usually without warning.
The modern version of the bar opening is a search results page. Custom moves to whoever is easiest to find, and a business that was well known for twenty years can lose ground to a newer one that is simply more visible, without anybody deciding it should happen. That is not a reason to panic, it is a reason to be found, and the towns that recover are the ones that stop assuming the trade will keep arriving out of habit. SEO
A younger, growing suburb, which is rare down here
At a median age of fifty, Broulee is markedly younger than most of the coast, and it has been growing as residential land near Moruya has been taken up.
That produces demand the older towns do not have: building and renovation, the trades attached to it, families, sport, food, childcare, and everything a household with children needs and a retired couple does not.
For a business in that market the practical point is that new residents have no established loyalties. Somebody who moved here last year has no plumber, no mechanic and no favourite café, and they find all three the same way, which is by searching. That is the cheapest customer a local business will ever acquire and it is almost entirely won or lost online. Website design
And the visitors, who want to know about the island
Alongside the residential trade there is a genuine visitor draw, including a nature reserve on an island joined to the beach by a sand spit, which is the sort of thing people look up before they come.
If any part of your business touches that, the practical answers are the product: parking, tides, whether it can be walked to, what is open. Those are searched constantly and answered rarely.
Questions about working outside your own town.
The same five come up wherever we are on this coast, so they are answered once here rather than eighty slightly different times.
Will people in the next town along still find us?+
That depends on whether your site ever mentions them, and most do not. Search results shift with where the person is standing, so a business that only ever names its own town tends to vanish about fifteen minutes up the road. The fix is usually structural rather than a rewrite.
How do you decide which towns are worth a page and which are not?+
On whether we can write something true about that town that would not also be true of the one next to it. If we cannot, we do not build the page, because a run of near-identical pages with the name swapped is something search engines actively demote, and the damage lands on the whole site rather than the pages that caused it. Where the honest answer is one page instead of five, we say so.
We are the only business of our kind for half an hour in either direction. Does any of this matter?+
It matters differently. You are not fighting a competitor down the street, you are fighting the assumption that nobody nearby does this at all, which sends people further afield before they ever look properly. Being unmistakably present across the whole stretch is worth more to you than outranking anybody.
Our customers drive to us rather than the other way round. Does that change anything?+
Yes, and it is the thing most sites have backwards. If people travel to you, the page has to lead with where you are and how long it takes to get there. If you travel to them, it has to lead with how far you go. Very few sites answer either question at all, which is why the ones that do get the call.
What happens if we stop covering an area?+
Tell us and we take it down properly, which means the page, the internal links and the service area list all change in the same pass. Claiming somewhere you no longer go is a poor experience for the person who rings, and it eventually becomes a ranking problem as well.
They have no plumber, no mechanic and no favourite anything. Tell us the trade and we will make sure you are what they find.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.